I thought I had hit my my low for now. I thought packing up my things and leaving a course that I had always thought was my vocational path was the low point of this year.
I was wrong.
On Easter Monday my cat died. It may sound like a small thing to most people, but this was completely unexpected and I was away from home when it happened. This has affected me more than anything has for quite some time.
I tried for a long time to think why it had had such an impact. Yes I loved her and yes, she meant an awful lot, but so have others and their loss did not hit me this hard. After the initial shock I was able to look back at the time I had her and I realised she had symbolized much more than a pet for me.
I had got her 3 years ago, just before I went off sick from my job, which I never returned to, due to ME. I have lost so much to this illness over the years, missed out on a lot and for me my cat was the one thing it could not take from me. It sounds silly and irrational, but there it is. There have been many moments in my life where I have had to make sacrifices because of my illness, where I have given up personal relationships (probably wrongly) as too hard or overwhelming to cope with alongside everyday life. For me it was so important to maintain this facade of being able to manage the everyday things that relationships and personal connections became peripheral to my life.
Only in the last few years have I realised I have this the wrong way round. During the long months of my illness where I could have slid very easily into disability, quietly surrendering to the illness that constantly tests my mental strength, I got up every morning because there was a little soul that was depending on me. The simple task of getting up and feeding her was the difference between persevering and drifting into obscurity.
In return I received so much love and affection. She kept me company when I could not leave the house, she stopped me going mad in that pokey little flat all on my own. And now she is dead and it is difficult to sum this up to people. I had not realised how much of a unit we had become in my mind. I may not ever get the chance to have a family, I don't even have a home right now, but at least I had my Hattie. Well now I don't even have that.
This loss has magnified a gaping hole in my life and I don't even know how to start to fill it.
